11 December 2007

Stripburger #46 - Laugh out Loud!

Stripburger #46 came out a while ago, in the fist days of October, but since we 'forgot' to mention it on this blog on time, this is not exactly news anymore. Lets call it olds, then.

The Laugh Out Loud! special feature was prepared in collaboration with City of Women, the Ljubljana-based 13th International Festival of Contemporary Arts. Stripburger’s call for submissions Laugh Out Loud! addressed female comic artists only.

Why? Because independent comics production tends to favor only two kinds of laughter and one kind of gender. Since parody and satirical laughter of many male comic artists became an unquestioned standard of critical or even subversive thought, the basic question “why are there no female cartoonists” was inevitably followed by others: we wanted to detect the line between subversive and reactionary laughter, we were curious about all the possible ways one can laugh on fifty feature pages, we were bold enough to wonder about reasons for the existence of so many kinds of humor and found out that yes, the variety includes the gender difference as well. The submitted comics reminded us how funny it is to see us burst out laughing only to realize later we weren’t laughing at the same thing...